Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

wind pumping in off the sludge; stinging his cheeks with granules and scouring the island of human traces, the eroded particles of other islands down the line.

  Looking back he was unable to glimpse Harry.

  He understood Mud and Swiss to have been killed on the atoll’s southern edge, a bay there, a tongue of rising folds heaving in slow motion, waves that echoed deeper currents, the end result of active and inactive zones. Areas of flux toured the ocean like submerged weather systems, separate, yet every bit as fickle as their cousins overhead. Such tides were thrall to no moon.

  Returning to where he had left his partner Ivan was careful of his footing, the rock loose and powdery, assailed like himself by dust-impregnated squalls. But Harry was gone. Ivan kicked his empty flask off the shallow escarpment.

  ‘Hey! Harry, where are you?’

  No reply. He continued on to the beach.

  The survey, when finally it arrived, had landed where the two wheels now stood. He imagined he could make out the vague impressions of groundhooks and dumped equipment.

  ‘Find anything?’

  Ivan spun round. ‘Harry...’ He struggled to contain his surprise.

  His partner pushed back his hat and scratched his head. ‘I made a tour of the island.’

  ‘And?’

  Harry grinned, flicked ash from his cigarette. ‘Nothing.’

  There was a call from Central.

  Ivan rested a long finger against his nose. His sharp features resembled a bird’s, a semblance exaggerated by his reflection in the wheel’s canopy.

  ‘We can shoot him? Is that what they say?’

  ‘If and when it should prove necessary. They’re waiving the rules on this one.’

  ‘What changed their minds?’ quizzed Harry, hopping from foot to foot, uncharacteristically enthused.

  Ivan had never seen him so wound up. ‘They’re sending in a flyer, and marksmen.’

  ‘How long before they get here?’

  Ivan shrugged, his own trepidation as incongruous as his partner’s excitement. ‘An hour.’

  ‘An hour,’ repeated Harry, possessed of an animal hunger, a gnawing deep within. There was a savage lust in his bones. He spat, grinning at the faint coil of gases that rose from the strand. He crushed his palms together.

  ‘Right...’

  iii

  Harry and Ivan were dead, killed by Luther Canning. That much was self-evident. The flyer, when it arrived, skimmed over the sea and came to rest on the beach near the two abandoned wheels, its Weekender compliment, all trained security operatives, stepping down. They walked in single file to the island’s southern extreme where they had spotted two bodies on circling the crumbling atoll. Lounging like seals were Harry and Ivan, shot through the head.

  The report cited the weapon involved as belonging to Harry, but there was no trace of it. Luther, too, had vanished...

  Peculiar, the Ologists called it.

  iv

  He knew as much as he wanted to know about Oriel, its before and after: latency, riches, potential. He knew very little, the extended sphere of his thinking merely sufficient to accommodate Jenny, her death real to him: happening, actual. He knew of Harry and Ivan, their deaths past. A rehearsal? Jenny existed outside her body now.

  Luther Canning.

  Island 9 was a service station on the east carriageway, a faded yellow building smelling of oil-based substances wary of flame. Luther parked the car and left it, feet crunching gravel.

  The place was deserted. He tried the mesh-screened door. Locked, inside dust, cartons, a faded map of Stanley county, the sprawling precincts of Moss contained in a dull rectangle of plastic - 1:100,000, the Free State of Iliac. To the south lay High Combulo, to the north and east undeveloped plateau. The service station stood at a crossroads. He had worked here between nightmares, filling tanks, listening to travellers’ tales, watching television. Now, in the cold, Luther carried Jenny’s body to the rear of the low building, determined to break inside before the black of night overwhelmed him.

  The car was without lights, its electrics shorted. Blood on the seats and holes in the doors, he doubted it would start come morning. But he had nowhere to go. Nowhere to stay either.

  He put down the corpse, a small parcel, and picked up a stone. Face turned away he broke a window, the noise of shattering glass frighteningly loud in the chill emptiness that characterized this part of the Free State. The nearest town was in High Combulo, a lawless trading post across the air border called Dryshoulders after the grey hills in whose shade it nestled, the confluence of vacant rivers. In summer the plateau and highlands fringing the eastern horizon were visible from the station’s roof; Dryshoulders too, arid and boxy, if you wished to climb the five metre neon EXPRESS sign, as Luther had, to replace a fuse.

  Inside was much as he remembered. There was no power, no water. Perhaps batteries, he thought, raising the steel latch on the back door, lifting the blanket-wrapped corpse and carrying it to a stuffed chair. There must be batteries. He descended the concrete steps to the workshop with its automobile parts and stagnant atmosphere. Batteries to give colour and light, to imbue the TV with pictures and flood the surrounding earth with neon glare. EXPRESS, EXPRESS, off and on in whole and part, a blazing marker on the road to nowhere.

  He’d felt the bullets entering Jenny’s body. They had driven him out, severing that empathic link. His scream went unheard by those surrounding the vehicle, blown out by projectiles and pain. Death crushed him, its merciless grip squeezing him from her eyes. He had been unable to save her, to drag her after him, inchoate, through the window, as their relationship was just begun and he was still the lesser partner. The flesh was wholly hers, while his own stood upright in a locker on platform six, West Terminus. Green the hue of its skin.

  Luther woke in it, light and sound leaking in through vents in the thin plate steel.

  Re-established, he flexed the stubs of fingers, stretching as best he could in the confined space, listening to announcements, trains and people. Then he let his anger surface and burst from the locker, scattering men and women, crashing through a flower stall and a newspaper stand, the brash illumination swamping his darkened mind as shrunken green Luther Canning charged out of the crowded terminus, leaping turnstiles and brushing aside security personnel. Skidding on the pavement, a blur of revolving doors behind him, he hailed a taxi. But none stopped. Those that were waiting sped away in panic at his glittering, toothy mien. He climbed onto the roof of a delivery truck and from there onto the roof of the station. Policemen appeared in the street below, gun-waving. He sprinted across West Terminus, discarding the Hawaiian shirt that had covered most of his warty frame, leaving it trailing on an aerial as he pummelled his short legs, the muscles of which were stiff and quickly tiring. Luther gasped for breath. Teeth gritted, he jumped a three metre gap to a neighbouring building, a sprawling street-level bus depot, rolling on his back amid puckered felt as he lost his footing.

  Above and around him crowded silvered windows, seeming to lean inward at each inhalation. Suddenly his anger dissipated, replaced by a fresher urgency. There passed several frustrating seconds wherein he fought to orient himself in relation to Jenny - his and her whereabouts, their proximity.

  He would have to return to the site of the attack, from there trace the car. Only the streets would be crawling with cops. And time wasn’t on his side.

  A TV news team hovered over the concourse, raised on a hydraulic platform.

  So quick? Luther didn’t wait to be interviewed, choosing instead a direction that led eventually underground via the Faux Avenue shuttle. He peered nervously through the reflective pane, huddled under a brilliant orange tarpaulin. A freak, an offworld vagrant devolved into the nodular semblance of a cartoon character. Others had taken their own lives or fled down the sewers, a community of bogeymen whose existence was denied officially, although a small number were held captive. Some lived as hermits in the wild. Most went unaccounted
for. Luther was a mythological being, a strange and bizarre creature of the subvisual. The irony hurt. As a kid he’d zapped and blasted a menagerie of similar demons, unearthly beasts lurking in dark tunnels, preying on children. The symbolism was depressingly human. It might almost be a joke, an Ologist’s private carnival. That the kid had grown up to be a monster robbed Luther of many treasured right and wrong illusions and gifted him with few credible excuses. He hated this persona. It had Bad Guy written all over.

  Once again he found himself wrongly accused.

  He left the shuttle at Harmony, causing space to appear on the platform and emptying an elevator. Skull uncovered and grinning, it wouldn’t take the police long to catch up with him. He needed some clothes, and to that end followed a stocky youth into a clinically bright lavatory.

  Emerging, Luther adjusted his scarf, a chill wind penetrating, as winter still had its holiday home in the city. Hands deep in pockets, he wound his way through oddly quiet streets, following his crooked nose to a line of emergency vehicles. A small crowd shuffled behind a strung tape barrier. He concealed himself in it, able to watch as an ambulance was loaded. Jenny? He couldn’t be sure. How much time had passed? Maybe they’d taken her already. He had to retrieve her, coax the life back into her; a life quelled, absent, the soul transferable as Luther had experienced. Hers was a mutable self, one